Professor Crookes sent his observations to the Royal Society, of which he is a member. The society refused his communications. The evidence goes to show that it had only approved of the gifted chemist's mixing in heretical and occult researches on consideration of his demonstrating the fallacy of all those prodigies.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
Professor Stokes, the secretary, refused to consider the subject at all, or to inscribe even the title of the papers in the society's publications. It was an exact repetition of what took place at the Academy of Science in Paris in 1853. Professor Crookes scorned these arbitrary and anti-scientific judgments and denials and answered them by publishing the detailed description of his experiments. The following are the essential points of this description:
Fig. 6.
On trying these experiments for the first time, I thought that actual contact between Mr. Home's hands and the suspended body whose weight was to be altered was essential to the exhibition of the force; but I found afterwards that this was not a necessary condition, and I therefore arranged my apparatus in the following manner:
The accompanying cuts (Figs. 4, 5, 6) explain the arrangement. Fig. 4 is a general view, and Figs. 5 and 6 show the essential parts more in detail. The reference letters are the same in each illustration. A B is a mahogany board, 36 inches long by 9½ inches wide and 1 inch thick. It is suspended at the end, B, by a spring balance, C, furnished with an automatic register, D. The balance is suspended from a very firm tripod support, E.